As the opening chords of Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" swell, 17 women stand like a grove of trees in moonlight, one arm raised as though to shield their faces from the divine. George Balanchine created "Serenade" in 1934, just months after arriving in America, and 70 years later it still leaves dance lovers in meditative awe.

This vision of tulle skirts and spiritual yearning is just one manifestation of a genius capable of evoking the grandeur of imperial Russia, the jazzy athleticism of America and the romanticism of France -- sometimes all in the same ballet. But Balanchine's stylistic breadth doesn't even begin to tell the story of his stature. Balanchine made ballet a legitimate art in a country once hostile to the form. He made dances of such depth, musicality and startling modernism that leading painters and poets flocked to see them. In 2004, to mark what would have been his 100th birthday, at least 68 companies around the globe danced Balanchine ballets.

Now at the twilight of that centennial, two slim books have appeared to celebrate his life. Committed ballet fans will have to wait a year more for the long-promised study of Balanchine's work by Arlene Croce, the former New Yorker dance writer and his leading living critic. But readers could do worse than to bide their time with new biographies by Terry Teachout and Robert Gottlieb, both short, for the most part engagingly written and designed to appeal to the general arts fan just encountering Balanchine's legacy.

We've heard plenty in the books pages this year about Balanchine's artistic associate, Jerome Robbins, thanks to Deborah Jowitt's engrossing new biography. Robbins makes, in many ways, a sexier story: a Broadway titan tortured by self-doubts that drove him to cruelty in the studio. Balanchine can look angelically tame by comparison: He worked quickly and considerately, with a gentleman's charm (though he, too, could cut dancers to the quick with a politely phrased aside). Steps seemed to pour out of him with ease.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt's Release New Song for 'March for Our Lives'Wibbitz

Anna Faris, Eugenio Derbez star in 'Overboard'Fox5DC

But his life story is filled with drama: a mostly family-less childhood in revolutionary Russia; four or five wives, depending on whether you count his common-law companion Alexandra Danilova; and what Teachout sensationally describes as "an endless string of torrid affairs." The arc of his professional achievements is no less suspenseful, from his radical "Apollo" for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1928 to the establishment of the New York City Ballet 20 years later. He created more than 400 ballets before his death in 1983, teaching his audience to "see the music and hear the dancing," and illuminating many scores by his idol, Igor Stravinsky.

Teachout -- a prolific critic who defines himself as an expert on music and a novice in everything else -- pares this career to a poignant narrative. Beginning with the sense of revelation he felt upon witnessing his first "Concerto Barocco" in 1987, he traverses the key points of any Balanchine gospel in a warm, populist voice. Chapters bear quirky titles such as "Tough Potato" ("[E]ven a potato has a soil in which it grows best," Balanchine says. "My soil is ballet.") and "The Very Expensive Tree" (i.e., the Christmas tree in "The Nutcracker"). If the portrait is a smidge simplistic -- and dismissive of 19th century ballet's achievements -- it's still a highly recommendable introduction.

Gottlieb, a former editor in chief of the New Yorker and Knopf, has the advantage of authority. He began watching Balanchine ballets in 1948 and later served on the New York City Ballet's board. (Balanchine's successor Peter Martins asked Gottlieb, then the editor of the New Yorker, to resign after publishing a stinging review by Arlene Croce, but that's another story.)

Gottlieb's account gleams with firsthand insight and telling tidbits, including a reprint of a Life magazine article carrying Balanchine's byline. But his narrative fractures after the founding of NYCB, breaking up high points into thematic chapters such as "His Women and His Men." This is a book of eyewitness elegance rather than evangelical passion, full of satisfying connections for those who have read the existing Balanchine biographies by Bernard Taper and Richard Buckle, less concerned with persuading a new generation of Balanchine's greatness.

As for the future, Gottlieb, for years Peter Martins' most nettlesome detractor, is surprisingly restrained about Martins' stewardship of Balanchine's company. Teachout worries not about NYCB's preservation but about the evanescence of dance in general, and some of his provocations might rankle dance devotees. Quoting W.H. Auden's assessment of ballet as a "very, very minor art," he asks, "Is it possible that [Balanchine] poured his prodigal energies into a pond too small to hold them?"

Still, he can't help hoping Balanchine's works will endure, although Balanchine himself, always deeply religious, accepted that everything earthly passes. For now, more than two decades after his death, his legacy is flourishing. As Gottlieb writes on the state of New York City Ballet, "[I]t is the resulting diaspora of Balanchine dancers that has spread his repertory and his approach to dancing throughout the Western world."

Today Balanchine's ballets live, and as Teachout's title implies, everything you need to know about his genius is contained within them. Maybe, thanks to these loving biographies, balletomanes won't be the only arts lovers to see Balanchine's brilliance with their own eyes. 